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Beebe, Lachmann, and Jaffe build a case for the possibility that interactions between mothers and their babies of four months become encoded as permanent intrapsychic structures of the babies' brains. As part of doing so, they also detail a remarkable contribution to the technique of studying interpersonal behavior, micro time-series regression analysis. Through the efficacy of their technique, they establish that infants as young as at four months of age engage in a process of interaction in which the infant may both initiate and maintain the scenario. I will return to this finding and some of its implications. Because the authors place the finding in the context of relating early psychological experience to later personality, that seems the first matter to discuss.
The interesting review of the literature in the first half of the article supports the possibility that an interactive pattern encoded by the infant early on will persist through the several cortical reorganizations that characterize its maturing brain (Hebb, 1949; Metcalf, 1979). Specifically, Beebe and her colleagues (1997) point out that patterns of infant-mother attunement in early infancy correlate highly with the nature of the relationship when the infant is a year old.